Finissage of the `15th Schömberger Fotoherbst´. After the announcement of the winners of the competition we see the multimedia show of a journey to magical places in Europe by Hartmut Krinitz. The voice of the DVD speakes of a journey that took ten years and leads from Greece to the North Cape as well as from Ireland to Spain and Portugal. The narrative joins the images together into a seemingly coherent journey in search of, in this case, magical places.

The viewer is not taken along at the times in between to the spoiled, rainy photos. It is as if we speak of our own lives. A string of pearls of highlights that actually has little to do with the ups and downs that we experience “in real”.

Homer’s adventures of Odysseus also take place one after the other in a row, without appreciating the long seajourneys of privation in between. The Odyssey of Homer is indeed a text, but if we look at the time of its creation, it is more likely to be something like a written song, i.e. still anchored in the oral tradition, still a sensual overall result as today the multimedia shows.

In the Kurpark outside there is a strict selection of a good dozen of these hundreds of pictures (see bekow). I remember similar stagings: in 2017 it was Peter Gebhardt who crossed Europe from Turkey to the North Cape in his Bulli (see below) to show us the most beautiful thing that came before his lens on the way, or in 2015 the prototype of this travelling picture collector Michael Martin with `the deserts of the earth´(see below). Also a journey that began with the moped and has now arrived in the most remote corners of the world on multimedia excursions.

Apparently there is some wisdom to collect on the way, this is hinted at in the personal lecture or in the soundtrack of the multimedia shows but I wonder what really came out besides a lot of pictures. These multimedia shows are a medium between single photos and films. They have a flow, even if mostly in single pictures and a soundtrack, they have the ability to grab the audience.

But don’t films make that better? I can think of two moving films, which are not completely new but which I have seen recently: in “Into the wild” a journey to death and in “Wild” a journey to a new life. But staged and acted, and yet comparable to the travels of our photo heroes, really experienced, after a real story. In the last article I asked myself whether travel photography still works today. The success of “Weit” shows that telling stories about one’s own travels still works. That is, I think, also the fascination of these Odysseys. That there is someone, who has really experienced them. And he tells you about it. And telling that is hardly possible today without pictures.